"Ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word."

“We speak of people "taking refuge" in vagueness — the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough.”

“But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense "red" and "blue" any more than "resemblance" : we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that "this is red.”

“J. L. Austin" at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”

“Words are not facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers.”

“Like "real", "free" is only used to rule out the suggestion of some or all of its recognized antitheses. As "truth" is not a name of a characteristic of assertions, so "freedom" is not a name for a characteristic of actions, but the name of a dimension in which actions are assessed.”

“It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence.”